Piped water access, child health and the complementary role of education : panel data evidence from South Africa
Date
2017
Authors
Wapenaar, Korstiaan Erich
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Abstract
This study establishes the causal impact of piped water access on child health in rural South Africa (2008 – 2015) through the use of a panel dataset and a quasi-experimental sample space. By employing an ordinal measure of child health as the dependent variable within ordinal probit, fixed and random effects, propensity-score matched difference-in-difference and system-GMM estimators, it is demonstrated that positive health benefits for children with access to piped water are observed if and only if the minimum level of educational attainment of the primary-caregiver is equal to or greater than 7 years. This finding of complementarity is demonstrated to be a function of an individual’s (in)capacity to evaluate water quality: people below this threshold suffer from a piped water bias, place insufficient weight on the observable characteristics of water when determining water quality and are subsequently less likely to treat piped water preceding consumption. The interactional effect estimates are statistically significant at the 5% level with the impact ranging from 1.617 to 2.008 levels.
Description
Thesis (M. Com. (Economics))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, School of Economic & Business Sciences, 2017
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Citation
Wapenaar, Korstiaan Erich (2017) Piped water access, child health and the complementary role of education : panel data evidence from South Africa, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, <https://hdl.handle.net/10539/24407>